The Last of Philip Banter (Penguin Classic Crime). Woefully neglected authors with three names with posthumous websites number two: John Franklin Bardin. The Deadly Percheron and The Last of Philip Banter are two of the books I judge all mystery novels, from the hard-boiled to the whimsical, by -- and to date they have nearly all been found lacking. These two books are like a cross between Jim Thompson and Julian Symons, somehow combining the obsessive, unhinged grip of noir with the inventive, controled inteligence of the locked room mystery, t ... [allconsuming.net]

I really like the RSS feed from allconsuming.net. They subscribe to bunches of blogs, then post anything that contains in its link an Amazon search string, as do my book mentions. Lots of people talk about books, so you see this parade of small comments, like the one above, about books you read a long time ago, books you never heard of, and books you mean to read. Often, as in the post above, from the Yes/No interlude, I get reminded of a book I really enjoyed reading, plus tips about books Ineed to read. The Deadly Percheron is really a great book. I haven't read the other Bardin book mentioned, but will go after it now.

A very nice page on the Osborne 1, with a picture that sure brings back memories. Not many pleasant memories, unfortunately. I had nothing but troubles with these machines. I much preferred my Apple ][, and learned CP/M and WordStar using Microsoft's SoftCard for it.

This is the interesting quote:

In 1982, the Osborne Computer Company introduced a successor, the Executive, with a larger screen and a cooling fan. Shortly thereafter, they anounced the next system, the Vixen, an MS-DOS compatible portable. Unfortunately, potential customers stopped buying the older Osbornes, waiting for the Vixen, which wasn't even ready to ship yet. Sales plummetted and Osborne quickly ran out of money and filed for bankruptcy in September of 1983.

What was interesting was how inept Osborne was at hidin the fact that they were going to bring out the Vixen. I remember sitting on BART sometime in alte 1982, talking with someone who told me he worked there, and that -- don't tell anyone -- they're going to bring out a PC knockoff. So who would buy an old 8-bit CP/M system when a PC compatible (at that time, that meant Lotus 1-2-3) was coming.

Good roundup. I haven't even heard of Lua, so I'll take a look at it, and also a closer look at Ruby. Of course, sometimes this gets in the way of getting work done, but in the past couple months I've gotten a lot of real work done with Python, and of course Perl is an essential tool. It's good to see the roundup of what's coming. It's interesting that it doesn't include languages such as PHP and UserLand Frontier.